Sony used to be a competent company that produced excellent hardware. Not the cheap crap, but the "you get what you pay for" kind of premium electronics. Around 1995 to 2000, though, I guess the upper manager decided to start milking their customer base by producing the kind of cheap crap that breaks, but still keeping the premium price for it. I've had a moderately expensive home theater system, a PS2, and at least three or four CD/DVD drives that were Sony models go belly-up on me.
It's not just their hardware. How many times have they been in the news lately? They're one of the members of RIAA/MPAA that have been extorting filesharers via P2P networks. Not that I condone this, but I find what they're doing much, much worse--telling people, "You can either pay us $2,000 for that song you downloaded, or we'll go to court and financially bankrupt you." If the punishment matched the crime, I wouldn't mind so much, but it is extremely obsessive. And then there was the whole rootkit fiasco, where Sony distributed rootkits on audio CDs. And the Blu-ray/HD-DVD war, where they strong-armed a format (and an obscene DRM scheme) using their media companies. And then the PSN hackage, where they were slow to act on and release information people needed to protect themselves. Almost every week I see another story of Sony's asshattery. As far as I'm concerned, it's a company that desperately needs to die so that other companies will learn that there are consequences for such consumer-unfriendly business practices.
So yeah, no PS3 for me.